blakeharris snips from a site called The X-Journals: "Nick Pope used to work for the British Ministry of Defense and for 3 years headed up their UFO project. His remit was to investigate UFO sightings reported to the British government, looking for evidence of any potential threat, or anything judged to be of any 'defence significance.'" Some very interesting anecdotes in here, as well as some background on how certain files about these sightings came to be preserved in the first place.
And I'll add "My Bad" if you actually do have TV licenses over there, and were being sarcastic.
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
That's why it's a TV license and not a BBC license.
After reading the article carefully it is clear: 1) All UFO related files from 1950s and early 1960s were destroyed, deliberately. 2) All UFO related files from 1967 (when it peaked) have been "deemed" classified and the Eurocrats in collusion with MoD has voted NEVER to release those details. What has been released are a few harmless sightings which can be/has been proven as false sightings. All the perfectly good material, from 1950s onwards have been either wiped or still kept hidden from public eye. As one m
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 01, @03:14AM (#28165255)
Reading the article carefully? Amazing, your brain turns off at all the sections that would counter your conspiracy-theories.
Some quotes: "I never authorized the destruction of a UFO file and following the 1967 ruling, nobody should."
"The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (passed in November 2000 and coming fully into force in January 2005) effectively reversed the default position and the presumption now is that information is released, unless any of the formal exemptions apply."
Another interesting tidbit: they are so busy with FOI requests, they can't spare the time to investigate new incidents.
You also say "What has been released are sightings that can be/have been proven to be false sightings". Now we could presume a huge conspiracy and alien underground bases dominating the British government, OR we could presume there really isn't much to see here... Occam's razor makes this an easy one. And that is if you consider that your statement is correct in the first place, which it isn't. Unless you can prove the following sightings to be false sightings (as stated in the article, which you "read so carefully")
"Some of the more interesting incidents included: 26th April 1984: Members of the public report a UFO in Stanmore. Two police officers attend the scene, witness the craft and sketch it. 13th October 1984: a saucer-shaped UFO is seen from Waterloo Bridge in London by numerous witnesses. 11th September 1985: 2 UFOs tracked on a military radar system travelling 10 nautical miles in 12 seconds. 4th September 1986: a UFO passes an estimated 1.5 nautical miles from the port side of a commercial aircraft. "
Apparently you can prove them to be false sightings - I'd recommend you contact the British MoD and tell them the good news.
The UFO conspiracy nuts will NEVER be happy. It isn't a matter of finding the truth, it is a matter of religion for them. They want to believe there are aliens visiting the Earth so they'll just keep on making up reasons why it could be happening. They'll ignore contradictory evidence, etc, etc. It is an argument you can't win. It is like the Creationists or any other nutty group like that. They have a view point they wish to be true, and so they'll only pay attention to things that would show that. They ignore or dismiss anything they don't like. There is no reasoning with the because it isn't a position based on reason.
Goes double since I imagine the truth is real boring. For example I'd personally bet on the high speed radar UFOs being glitches. As good as military radar is, it isn't perfect. It can get confused and display false positives. That is actually the idea behind active radar jamming. You send out strong signals that cause all sorts of false readings, so they can't tell where the real aircraft are.
Well that's not very exciting at all. Much more exciting to think it is some kind of alien craft that is so amazing it can travel at FTL speeds across the galaxy, yet can't even avoid primitive radar, something human planes can do.
Exactly, nothing short of the government releasing documents stating that there are UFO and they've been covering it up all along will satisfy these people. It doesn't even enter into their thinking that the reason why the government hasn't released such documents is because no such documents exist because there are no UFOs.
The run up to the Iraq war was like this. The weapons inspectors couldn't find WMD, so that must be prove that they exist and are being hidden!
Sorry this is me just being pedantic but this is a major pet peeve of mine.
Do they know what people saw in all of those instances? No they don't and that makes it a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Does it make it alien? I don't know. It could be alien it could be something completely human made. I'm open to whatever the evidence suggests.
Somebody might think it was a conspiracy or soemthing sinister to destroy proof or something. Actually as the article wrote :
QUOTE:What this meant was that prior to 1967, few UFO files had survived this process and with a few exceptions, UFO files from the Fifties and early Sixties had been destroyed.There was nothing sinister about this and such decisions were made all the time on a wide range of subjects
emphasis mine. Furthermore the reading of your post make it sound as if there was something to read that it is intentionnaly kept from eye as something sinister. but the conclusion of the author is different :
QUOTE:
I am always reluctant to use the word disclosure, because in ufology the word is often associated with the work of Dr Steven Greer, whose Disclosure Project has become something resembling a political campaign (as has Exopolitics) aimed at ending the UFO cover-up in which many conspiracy theorists believe. But I do use the word (with a small d and not a capital letter!) because in a very real sense, disclosure is precisely what the MoD is doing in relation to documents and files. Much has already been released and there's more to come. These are exciting times.
Emphasis mine. You sound more like thos conspiracy theorist he speaks of in his conclusion than somebody open to all possibilities, including the very highly probable possibility that there is indeed NOTHING really important to be disclosed, except data for a sociologic/psychologic study.
There was nothing sinister about this and such decisions were made all the time on a wide range of subjects
There's nothing sinister going on! Nothing sinister is happening, whatsoever. Nothing is happening, and it still isn't sinister! Let me give you a free clue: when records are being destroyed to prevent the citizenry from reading them, something sinister IS going on. Maybe it's just an appalling amount of waste, but still.
2) All UFO related files from 1967 (when it peaked) have been "deemed" classified and the Eurocrats in collusion with MoD has voted NEVER to release those details.
This, ladies and gents, is fascinating. Ordinarily, to varying degrees, governments use fear to keep the populace in check and maintain the status quo. This is every government, to an extent. To state that doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, does it? Even honourable causes [independent.co.uk] use fear as a motivator. So. Why surpress this?
Paranoia and distrust of the Government should only be taken so far.
Wrong. Paranoia and distrust of the Government should be unlimited, both on principle and for very good reasons of precedent.
That is separate from one's level of confidence in the data though.
You can totally distrust government while still having a rational head on your shoulders when dealing with evidence. A scientific approach to analysing UFO reports (and only stating what you know, not what you imagine) isn't optional, except to those
Paranoia and distrust of the Government should only be taken so far.
Paranoid may or may not be justified. However considering the sort of people you find involved in government, especially national governments, distrust by default is the only rational position.
I've heard that lots of airline pilots have UFO stories they won't talk about, since questions about their psychological stability would be the kiss of death in that particular career field.
I don't know if that's true or not. It sounds like a good book opportunity would be to go around and interview a bunch of *retired* airline pilots.
There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.
That's the irony of the UFO vs SETI situation, we as a whole just sit on a shitload of easily available information and better yet easy oppotunities to find out more about what could possibly be alien life artifacts flying in our own atmosphere, yet we insist to ignore it all, throw it in the loony bin and rather look for radioscopic needles in the haystack of the stars that are tens of light years away from us.
Methinks rather than pointing radio telescopes at the stars we should point more modest telescopes at whatever's flying in our sky. A few automated stations around the world that would observe the sky for moving objects automatically and record anything about the unidentified ones would offer great insight on the nature and characteristics of whatever those unidentified objects are, but no, no one cares, most shockingly not even scientists, who obviously have no interest in explaining the unexplained that occurs frequently in our atmosphere.
There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.
That is well and true, it however has a little problem: Those are UFOs in the literal sense, they are "unidentified flying object", not extra terrestrial spacecrafts. When you can't tell what something is, it simply means you don't know, it doesn't confirm that aliens are involved.
When it comes to hard evidence, there is simply nothing that points to E.T. Blobs of light in the sky can be lots of things, clouds, planets, satellites, floating lanterns, lense flare, insects and tons of more stuff. How many clear non-blurry pictures are there of alien space crafts? None. You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.
When you can't tell what something is, you should look for an explanation for it
Fixed it for you. Contrarily to a popular myth, not all UFO reports are easily dismissable. What do you do when you have pilots reporting chasing an object flying past Mach 10 and that it's backed by ground radar? Do you try to look for an explanation, whatever it may be, or do you sit on it? Well you're gonna like this, cause what we do is just sit on it, and make sure to not tell anyone.
And the explanation in your particular case is this:
We roll your eyes at yet another made up story. Simple as that.
Why? Because electronic warfare (ELINT) drones like me know how few RADAR systems are actually capable of measuring velocities that high. We also do the math. We sit down with our EW kit and build a real life fingerprint for the specific emitter that 'tracked' this alleged UFO. We tell you that your PRF / PRI, pulse duration, duty cycle, and your cute little pseudo random stagger pattern make your RADAR physically incapable of tracking anything above XXXX knots. We know this beyond any doubt because we have ego's bigger than your average fighter pilot. We know exactly how many pulses per paint it takes to put a little dot on your PPI because we count them, and not just theoretically, we grab a couple of those fighter jocks and have them run a few supersonic passes at the same time. We sit right there next to the scope with you and gloat as we say "I told you so!", pointing fingers at our scrawled out algebra. In terms of 'UFOs', we don't care about little green men, we actually care about "Non allied sucker popping up out of the waves doing mach 2 over our sigint station for some photographs, and then vanishing in a puff of sonic booms to who the hell knows where"
We leave the X file stuff for people back in the MoD, who then retire a couple of years later and hit the lucrative public talk circuits.
When the psych asked me why I wanted to work in a TS security field, I kid you not, I said "because I wanted to know if UFO's really exist" - we both laughed, but I was actually serious:-)
Exactly, actually I seem to recall that I was very dismissive of anything UFO-related until I read about this case. You have to give it to me that I never claimed there was any proof for alien presence though, I just claimed it was an explanation to seriously consider. Anything else can only be pure speculation. Although I'd like to point out that we ourselves go at great expenses to "annoy a couple of Martian pebbles";-).
But I think the real problem is that we usually don't even bother to read about such
You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.
The answer is clear, then... the aliens must be using advanced computers with scanner technology to detect camera and recording devices, and only show up where those devices aren't present! That way they can remain undetected to continue conducting their nefarious experiments on us!
But the cows know when the aliens are coming, and get real apprehensive about it! If you keep a pet cow in your house, it'll wake you up at night before you can be abducted!
In fact, every strange sighting is recorded and studied and, in most of the cases, totally explained. I have watched a lot of movies and pictures of UFOs. The number of insects, weather balloons, clouds, or even moon shots is staggering.
A professional astronomer was making the following remark : "it is our job to observe the sky and find uncommon things. Occasionally we do, but it is impressive to see how a professional with good tools is less likely to observe UFOs than an amateur with bad tools is."
UFO = Unindentified Flying/Floating Object. It does not mean "Alien spaceship". When an astronaut says "hey, I saw something passig by there !" it is classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed.
Sort them into the "unexplained" folder and move on. Just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it was an alien spacecraft. That case, as all the others, doesn't give you hard evidence for anything. Do we have now a clear picture of a space craft? Nope. Any idea how its propulsion system works? Nope. Who piloted it? Nope. Any idea about anything at all? Not really.
If you want to demonstrate that alien spacecrafts are real, you have to come up with some good evidence, not just an single unexplained anomaly. Find multiple anomalies that follow the same pattern and you might be getting somewhere, but a single one off doesn't really help you much with anything, especially not when you fill in the lack of facts with random UFO fiction.
When it comes to weird things happening in the air I like the story of British Airways Flight 9 [wikipedia.org], full of mystery and suspense and it also happens to be fully explained in the end.
Well you're obviously not a scientist, otherwise you'd want to know.
Obviously you're not a scientist, or you'd know the number one idea behind science is mistrust of our conclusions. You check and double-check continuously, until the mountain of results is overwhelming. And even then you keep in mind that you might still be wrong, that the next experiment may not fit with the rest.
The one thing you don't do, that you must never, ever do as a scientist is jump to conclusions on flimsy data. When something is unknown or unidentified, you don't default to the first thing that comes to mind. You might, and in fact should, form hypotheses. There's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. But there isn't even remotely sufficient evidence to validate that hypothesis.
And this is unfortunate, as I think there would be few things more amazing than the discovery of alien intelligence, here, visiting Earth. But knowing how much I'd like such a thing to be true, brings us back to the number one idea behind science. Knowing how easy it is to interpret data in accordance not to reality, but to our desires, you have to mistrust your conclusions, especially those you'd really like to be true. To do otherwise is not science, it's superstition, it's religion, it's a million things but the one thing it is not is science.
The one thing you don't do, that you must never, ever do as a scientist is jump to conclusions on flimsy data
And yet the major thrust of everything you've been saying is to jump to the enormous, and currently unsupportable, conclusion that some UFOs are actually alien spacecraft which have, somehow, travelled billions of light years from their home worlds all the way here to Earth and then spend 10mins or so flying around, maybe a day or so inserting probes in rednecks and then somehow disappear.
Are you a moron? I believe you are. I just said that UFOs were reported by pilots and NASA astronauts. Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon and otherwise have been high ranking USAF pilots have seen UFOs, and you want to dismiss it as superstitious kook BS? How many pilots must report something they can't explain before you deem the reported phenomenons worthy of scientific and methodological investigation?
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not, and what you deemed permanently impossible you'll just ignore even if presented with most compelling reports or even if you see it with your own eyes. People like you just keep trying to find justifications for what they permanently consider impossible, without considering for a minute that maybe they're wrong about what's possible and what's not. It's called denial.
Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon
Does that give you magic power to detect alien spacecraft or immunity from mistaking something you see? Your appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] just isn't a very good argument.
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not,
No, they are skeptic because they haven't seen good evidence.
But they tend to focus on average Joe's UFO sightings rather than the well documented and really hard to explain ones.
You miss the point. If you want to prove the existence of alien spacecraft you don't have to find hard to explain cases, you have to find the opposite, well explained ones. You need clear pictures and well observed objects, not anomalies in the sky that you couldn't identify.
And my appeal to authority is justified in that you'd think that a highly trained elite pilot who's flown for years and even been to space would know what he's looking at when he looks in the sky around him.
The human visual system is build to measure distances and velocities at small scales. When you fly high up in the air you have the exact opposite, huge velocities, great distances and worst of all nothing to use as reference. No amount of experience will help you when you encounter an unexpected thing in the sky, as it becomes nearly impossible to judge size or velocity just by sight.
I think many people forget that in science, and really in all facets of life the burden of proof is on the claimant. You make a claim that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth, it is then incumbent on YOU to provide good evidence of that fact. You don't get to say "Well here's something that isn't explained, thus it must be an ET UFO." No, if it isn't explained it isn't explained. That isn't evidence. You have to provide some real concrete evidence to back up your theory.
The "Well you can't explain it so I must be right," crap is the same thing the religious fundies pull. "Oh evolution doesn't explain everything about the state of organisms on this planet, so god must have created us." "Oh the big bang doesn't explain where the universe came form so god must have created it."
Those are not legit arguments and neither is "You can't explain what this is so it must be an ET UFO." Nope, I don't have to provide an explanation or evidence. You do. If you are sure it is of extraterrestrial origin, then you need to furnish the proof of that fact. Otherwise, in the absence of sufficient evidence we have to write it off as a "Don't know."
That is actually what UFO means: Unidentified Flying Object. It simply means an object seen in the sky, that the observer(s) were not able to positively identify. That does NOT mean it is an alien craft. The nutjob movement has co-opted the term and has tried to twist it in to "Anything in the sky we can't immediately explain is an alien craft."
So for all you UFO nuts out there: Put up or shut up. Let's see proof, and not the kind of BS fake proof the creationists trot out. Let's see some real, valid, empirical proof, not wild speculations. If you can't provide that, then shut your yap.
I think you also miss the fact that science is a three-step process:
Observe.
Hypothesise.
Test.
Right now, we've done a lot of observing with respect to UFOs. We've done a little bit of hypothesising, but not very much. We've done almost no testing. 'They can't explain it so I must be right,' as you point out, is not the right attitude for science. The correct approach is 'they can't explain it therefore it merits further study.'
No, you're the one who's missing the point, it's not about proving alien life, it's about getting ANYONE to get off their ass and investigate that whole shit, because it's obviously worth investigating,
What do you want to investigate? We don't have a crashes spacecraft to poke around in and neither do we have any idea when or why an UFO might pop up. So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone. If you want to investigate something you need something to investigate, random events at random times that happen only every few years in t
As a scientist, something that is unexplained is intrinsically interesting. Astronauts have to undergo a lot of psychological testing and are familiar with most of the things that might be visible. If they are seeing things that they can't explain then it means one of the following is true:
Some aspect of their environment is affecting the human visual system in a way that we have not studied.
They are seeing something real, but we don't know what.
Even knowing which of these is the case would be interesting. Beyond that, knowing exactly what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, is worth knowing.
Sorry but how would one conclude with certainty that a pilot claiming that "something was maneuvering in great speed around their craft" was actually a precise star-like fixed point in the sky? And more importantly, how mad would a pilot have to be to think that a star is flying circles around his airplane?
The UFO sightings in the 1960s were most likely stealth aircraft (such as the Lockheed A-12 [wikipedia.org], the deployment of which matches the dates in the article very conveniently)
No word on why an A-12 would be in Britain, although odds are that any Cold War era UFO sightings were experimental aircraft that the government didn't want anybody (read: the Soviets) to know about.
Nice way to talk out of your arse, considered that very few UFO reports could be explained by a A-12/SR-71, which only two distinctive characteristics are a very distinct shape and the ability to fly very fast in a straight line, and as you said yourself, there's no reasons for such planes to go fly circles above Britain.
It's fairly interesting that as with the US documents there's no smoking guns here but there are a lot of 'yeah that was experimental or military but we couldn't admit it at the time' and the rest is 'we have no idea what that was.' So either they're playing a meta-game here or there really is nothing but 'man that unidentified thing sure was... unidentified.' I think it's unlikely that two such incompetent entities could do such a brilliant job of covering up something as huge as decades (or millenia) long alien visitations, but this won't prove it either way.
Interestingly, they decided to release the files due to the sheer workload of responding to individual requests for information. The article states that they got more requests for info about UFOs than about Iraq for Afghanistan...anyway, you can get to the files here:
"All these files and more besides are now available on the MoD website, www.mod.uk. Go to the Freedom of Information section and search the Publication Scheme and the Disclosure Log, using keywords such as UFO and UAP and itâ(TM)s all there, alongside documents and files on a vast range of other fascinating subjects including MoDâ(TM)s 2001 remote viewing study."
Nick Pope has written two science fiction books about alien contact, Operation Thunderchild and Operation Lightning Strike.
I've read Operation Thunderchild and enjoyed it a lot. It is set in Britain, which is nice for us because so much of the other material is set in the US and copies from itself so much that one film is like another. It also deals quite well with the whole difficulty that governments have in working out what's happening from lots of confused reports, deciding how to tackle the problem, understanding the intent of the ufos and when and what to tell the population.
I like it because the humans have a hard time and I think that's likely.
British English (Score:4, Informative)
Britain definitely does not have a Ministry of Defense and we also don't have a TV License either.
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And I'll add "My Bad" if you actually do have TV licenses over there, and were being sarcastic.
Re:British English (Score:4, Informative)
And I'll add "My Bad" if you actually do have TV licenses over there, and were being sarcastic.
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
Parent
Re:British English (Score:5, Insightful)
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
That's why it's a TV license and not a BBC license.
Parent
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To return to the OP, it's neither - it's a TV licence.
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/buyorrenew/index.jsp [tvlicensing.co.uk]
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*sigh*
Verbs take "s". Nouns take "c".
Hence, many practising doctors hope to establish their own a practice. A country's defences are used for defense. A licence is used to license.
However, Webster decided that this rule was too simple, so chose some words to make irregular in his dictionary.
Re:British English (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Tends to get overlooked as it's next to the much bigger Ministry of Fiddling Expenses and Wasting Taxpayers' Money
Uh-huh. (Score:5, Funny)
And then, in 2002, they transferred him over to the MOD Iraq Intelligence Gathering Service...
Lameduck release. RTFA carefully (Score:2, Interesting)
After reading the article carefully it is clear:
1) All UFO related files from 1950s and early 1960s were destroyed, deliberately.
2) All UFO related files from 1967 (when it peaked) have been "deemed" classified and the Eurocrats in collusion with MoD has voted NEVER to release those details.
What has been released are a few harmless sightings which can be/has been proven as false sightings.
All the perfectly good material, from 1950s onwards have been either wiped or still kept hidden from public eye.
As one m
Re:Lameduck release. RTFA carefully (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading the article carefully? Amazing, your brain turns off at all the sections that would counter your conspiracy-theories.
Some quotes:
"I never authorized the destruction of a UFO file and following the 1967 ruling, nobody should."
"The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (passed in November 2000 and coming fully into force in January 2005) effectively reversed the default position and the presumption now is that information is released, unless any of the formal exemptions apply."
Another interesting tidbit: they are so busy with FOI requests, they can't spare the time to investigate new incidents.
You also say "What has been released are sightings that can be/have been proven to be false sightings". Now we could presume a huge conspiracy and alien underground bases dominating the British government, OR we could presume there really isn't much to see here... Occam's razor makes this an easy one. And that is if you consider that your statement is correct in the first place, which it isn't. Unless you can prove the following sightings to be false sightings (as stated in the article, which you "read so carefully")
"Some of the more interesting incidents included: 26th April 1984: Members of the public report a UFO in Stanmore. Two police officers attend the scene, witness the craft and sketch it.
13th October 1984: a saucer-shaped UFO is seen from Waterloo Bridge in London by numerous witnesses.
11th September 1985: 2 UFOs tracked on a military radar system travelling 10 nautical miles in 12 seconds.
4th September 1986: a UFO passes an estimated 1.5 nautical miles from the port side of a commercial aircraft.
"
Apparently you can prove them to be false sightings - I'd recommend you contact the British MoD and tell them the good news.
Parent
Don't bother (Score:5, Insightful)
The UFO conspiracy nuts will NEVER be happy. It isn't a matter of finding the truth, it is a matter of religion for them. They want to believe there are aliens visiting the Earth so they'll just keep on making up reasons why it could be happening. They'll ignore contradictory evidence, etc, etc. It is an argument you can't win. It is like the Creationists or any other nutty group like that. They have a view point they wish to be true, and so they'll only pay attention to things that would show that. They ignore or dismiss anything they don't like. There is no reasoning with the because it isn't a position based on reason.
Goes double since I imagine the truth is real boring. For example I'd personally bet on the high speed radar UFOs being glitches. As good as military radar is, it isn't perfect. It can get confused and display false positives. That is actually the idea behind active radar jamming. You send out strong signals that cause all sorts of false readings, so they can't tell where the real aircraft are.
Well that's not very exciting at all. Much more exciting to think it is some kind of alien craft that is so amazing it can travel at FTL speeds across the galaxy, yet can't even avoid primitive radar, something human planes can do.
Parent
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Exactly, nothing short of the government releasing documents stating that there are UFO and they've been covering it up all along will satisfy these people. It doesn't even enter into their thinking that the reason why the government hasn't released such documents is because no such documents exist because there are no UFOs.
The run up to the Iraq war was like this. The weapons inspectors couldn't find WMD, so that must be prove that they exist and are being hidden!
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Sorry this is me just being pedantic but this is a major pet peeve of mine.
Do they know what people saw in all of those instances? No they don't and that makes it a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). Does it make it alien? I don't know. It could be alien it could be something completely human made. I'm open to whatever the evidence suggests.
UFO != alien
Now back to our normally non-ranty programming.
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Careful on using "deliberately" (Score:5, Informative)
QUOTE:What this meant was that prior to 1967, few UFO files had survived this process and with a few exceptions, UFO files from the Fifties and early Sixties had been destroyed.There was nothing sinister about this and such decisions were made all the time on a wide range of subjects
emphasis mine. Furthermore the reading of your post make it sound as if there was something to read that it is intentionnaly kept from eye as something sinister. but the conclusion of the author is different :
QUOTE: I am always reluctant to use the word disclosure, because in ufology the word is often associated with the work of Dr Steven Greer, whose Disclosure Project has become something resembling a political campaign (as has Exopolitics) aimed at ending the UFO cover-up in which many conspiracy theorists believe. But I do use the word (with a small d and not a capital letter!) because in a very real sense, disclosure is precisely what the MoD is doing in relation to documents and files. Much has already been released and there's more to come. These are exciting times.
Emphasis mine. You sound more like thos conspiracy theorist he speaks of in his conclusion than somebody open to all possibilities, including the very highly probable possibility that there is indeed NOTHING really important to be disclosed, except data for a sociologic/psychologic study.
Parent
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There was nothing sinister about this and such decisions were made all the time on a wide range of subjects
There's nothing sinister going on! Nothing sinister is happening, whatsoever. Nothing is happening, and it still isn't sinister! Let me give you a free clue: when records are being destroyed to prevent the citizenry from reading them, something sinister IS going on. Maybe it's just an appalling amount of waste, but still.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This, ladies and gents, is fascinating. Ordinarily, to varying degrees, governments use fear to keep the populace in check and maintain the status quo. This is every government, to an extent. To state that doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, does it? Even honourable causes [independent.co.uk] use fear as a motivator. So. Why surpress this?
There is a school of thou
Paranoia and scientific caution are separate (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. Paranoia and distrust of the Government should be unlimited, both on principle and for very good reasons of precedent.
That is separate from one's level of confidence in the data though.
You can totally distrust government while still having a rational head on your shoulders when dealing with evidence. A scientific approach to analysing UFO reports (and only stating what you know, not what you imagine) isn't optional, except to those
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Paranoid may or may not be justified. However considering the sort of people you find involved in government, especially national governments, distrust by default is the only rational position.
UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard that lots of airline pilots have UFO stories they won't talk about, since questions about their psychological stability would be the kiss of death in that particular career field.
I don't know if that's true or not. It sounds like a good book opportunity would be to go around and interview a bunch of *retired* airline pilots.
- AJ
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.
That's the irony of the UFO vs SETI situation, we as a whole just sit on a shitload of easily available information and better yet easy oppotunities to find out more about what could possibly be alien life artifacts flying in our own atmosphere, yet we insist to ignore it all, throw it in the loony bin and rather look for radioscopic needles in the haystack of the stars that are tens of light years away from us.
Methinks rather than pointing radio telescopes at the stars we should point more modest telescopes at whatever's flying in our sky. A few automated stations around the world that would observe the sky for moving objects automatically and record anything about the unidentified ones would offer great insight on the nature and characteristics of whatever those unidentified objects are, but no, no one cares, most shockingly not even scientists, who obviously have no interest in explaining the unexplained that occurs frequently in our atmosphere.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a plethora of UFO reports out there from civil and military pilots, as well as air traffic control staff, radar operators, military base personel, and yes, even astronauts who went to the Moon.
That is well and true, it however has a little problem: Those are UFOs in the literal sense, they are "unidentified flying object", not extra terrestrial spacecrafts. When you can't tell what something is, it simply means you don't know, it doesn't confirm that aliens are involved.
When it comes to hard evidence, there is simply nothing that points to E.T. Blobs of light in the sky can be lots of things, clouds, planets, satellites, floating lanterns, lense flare, insects and tons of more stuff. How many clear non-blurry pictures are there of alien space crafts? None. You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Interesting)
When you can't tell what something is, you should look for an explanation for it
Fixed it for you. Contrarily to a popular myth, not all UFO reports are easily dismissable. What do you do when you have pilots reporting chasing an object flying past Mach 10 and that it's backed by ground radar? Do you try to look for an explanation, whatever it may be, or do you sit on it? Well you're gonna like this, cause what we do is just sit on it, and make sure to not tell anyone.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the MoD wants to find an explanation. Something flying past at mach 10 could be a new type of missile or experimental aircraft.
The MoD was never looking for aliens, they were looking for new weapons that could be used to attack the UK.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Interesting)
And the explanation in your particular case is this:
We roll your eyes at yet another made up story. Simple as that.
Why? Because electronic warfare (ELINT) drones like me know how few RADAR systems are actually capable of measuring velocities that high. We also do the math. We sit down with our EW kit and build a real life fingerprint for the specific emitter that 'tracked' this alleged UFO. We tell you that your PRF / PRI, pulse duration, duty cycle, and your cute little pseudo random stagger pattern make your RADAR physically incapable of tracking anything above XXXX knots. We know this beyond any doubt because we have ego's bigger than your average fighter pilot. We know exactly how many pulses per paint it takes to put a little dot on your PPI because we count them, and not just theoretically, we grab a couple of those fighter jocks and have them run a few supersonic passes at the same time. We sit right there next to the scope with you and gloat as we say "I told you so!", pointing fingers at our scrawled out algebra. In terms of 'UFOs', we don't care about little green men, we actually care about "Non allied sucker popping up out of the waves doing mach 2 over our sigint station for some photographs, and then vanishing in a puff of sonic booms to who the hell knows where"
We leave the X file stuff for people back in the MoD, who then retire a couple of years later and hit the lucrative public talk circuits.
When the psych asked me why I wanted to work in a TS security field, I kid you not, I said "because I wanted to know if UFO's really exist" - we both laughed, but I was actually serious :-)
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Exactly, actually I seem to recall that I was very dismissive of anything UFO-related until I read about this case. You have to give it to me that I never claimed there was any proof for alien presence though, I just claimed it was an explanation to seriously consider. Anything else can only be pure speculation. Although I'd like to point out that we ourselves go at great expenses to "annoy a couple of Martian pebbles" ;-).
But I think the real problem is that we usually don't even bother to read about such
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You'd guess in a time where every mobile has camera people would come up with some good pictures, but that hasn't happened.
The answer is clear, then... the aliens must be using advanced computers with scanner technology to detect camera and recording devices, and only show up where those devices aren't present! That way they can remain undetected to continue conducting their nefarious experiments on us!
But the cows know when the aliens are coming, and get real apprehensive about it! If you keep a pet cow in your house, it'll wake you up at night before you can be abducted!
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
A professional astronomer was making the following remark : "it is our job to observe the sky and find uncommon things. Occasionally we do, but it is impressive to see how a professional with good tools is less likely to observe UFOs than an amateur with bad tools is."
UFO = Unindentified Flying/Floating Object. It does not mean "Alien spaceship". When an astronaut says "hey, I saw something passig by there !" it is classified as a UFO because no one wants to take the time to find the identification of the debris he observed.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you gonna do with those?
Sort them into the "unexplained" folder and move on. Just because you can't explain something doesn't mean it was an alien spacecraft. That case, as all the others, doesn't give you hard evidence for anything. Do we have now a clear picture of a space craft? Nope. Any idea how its propulsion system works? Nope. Who piloted it? Nope. Any idea about anything at all? Not really.
If you want to demonstrate that alien spacecrafts are real, you have to come up with some good evidence, not just an single unexplained anomaly. Find multiple anomalies that follow the same pattern and you might be getting somewhere, but a single one off doesn't really help you much with anything, especially not when you fill in the lack of facts with random UFO fiction.
When it comes to weird things happening in the air I like the story of British Airways Flight 9 [wikipedia.org], full of mystery and suspense and it also happens to be fully explained in the end.
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Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
Well you're obviously not a scientist, otherwise you'd want to know.
Obviously you're not a scientist, or you'd know the number one idea behind science is mistrust of our conclusions. You check and double-check continuously, until the mountain of results is overwhelming. And even then you keep in mind that you might still be wrong, that the next experiment may not fit with the rest.
The one thing you don't do, that you must never, ever do as a scientist is jump to conclusions on flimsy data. When something is unknown or unidentified, you don't default to the first thing that comes to mind. You might, and in fact should, form hypotheses. There's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that UFOs are extraterrestrial craft. But there isn't even remotely sufficient evidence to validate that hypothesis.
And this is unfortunate, as I think there would be few things more amazing than the discovery of alien intelligence, here, visiting Earth. But knowing how much I'd like such a thing to be true, brings us back to the number one idea behind science. Knowing how easy it is to interpret data in accordance not to reality, but to our desires, you have to mistrust your conclusions, especially those you'd really like to be true. To do otherwise is not science, it's superstition, it's religion, it's a million things but the one thing it is not is science.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And yet the major thrust of everything you've been saying is to jump to the enormous, and currently unsupportable, conclusion that some UFOs are actually alien spacecraft which have, somehow, travelled billions of light years from their home worlds all the way here to Earth and then spend 10mins or so flying around, maybe a day or so inserting probes in rednecks and then somehow disappear.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you a moron? I believe you are. I just said that UFOs were reported by pilots and NASA astronauts. Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon and otherwise have been high ranking USAF pilots have seen UFOs, and you want to dismiss it as superstitious kook BS? How many pilots must report something they can't explain before you deem the reported phenomenons worthy of scientific and methodological investigation?
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not, and what you deemed permanently impossible you'll just ignore even if presented with most compelling reports or even if you see it with your own eyes. People like you just keep trying to find justifications for what they permanently consider impossible, without considering for a minute that maybe they're wrong about what's possible and what's not. It's called denial.
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Seriously, guys who actually went and walked on the Moon
Does that give you magic power to detect alien spacecraft or immunity from mistaking something you see? Your appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] just isn't a very good argument.
Now that's a bit off topic, but the real reason is that "sceptics" like you have settled on a frozen idea of what's possible and what's not,
No, they are skeptic because they haven't seen good evidence.
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
But they tend to focus on average Joe's UFO sightings rather than the well documented and really hard to explain ones.
You miss the point. If you want to prove the existence of alien spacecraft you don't have to find hard to explain cases, you have to find the opposite, well explained ones. You need clear pictures and well observed objects, not anomalies in the sky that you couldn't identify.
And my appeal to authority is justified in that you'd think that a highly trained elite pilot who's flown for years and even been to space would know what he's looking at when he looks in the sky around him.
The human visual system is build to measure distances and velocities at small scales. When you fly high up in the air you have the exact opposite, huge velocities, great distances and worst of all nothing to use as reference. No amount of experience will help you when you encounter an unexpected thing in the sky, as it becomes nearly impossible to judge size or velocity just by sight.
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Precisely (Score:4, Insightful)
I think many people forget that in science, and really in all facets of life the burden of proof is on the claimant. You make a claim that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth, it is then incumbent on YOU to provide good evidence of that fact. You don't get to say "Well here's something that isn't explained, thus it must be an ET UFO." No, if it isn't explained it isn't explained. That isn't evidence. You have to provide some real concrete evidence to back up your theory.
The "Well you can't explain it so I must be right," crap is the same thing the religious fundies pull. "Oh evolution doesn't explain everything about the state of organisms on this planet, so god must have created us." "Oh the big bang doesn't explain where the universe came form so god must have created it."
Those are not legit arguments and neither is "You can't explain what this is so it must be an ET UFO." Nope, I don't have to provide an explanation or evidence. You do. If you are sure it is of extraterrestrial origin, then you need to furnish the proof of that fact. Otherwise, in the absence of sufficient evidence we have to write it off as a "Don't know."
That is actually what UFO means: Unidentified Flying Object. It simply means an object seen in the sky, that the observer(s) were not able to positively identify. That does NOT mean it is an alien craft. The nutjob movement has co-opted the term and has tried to twist it in to "Anything in the sky we can't immediately explain is an alien craft."
So for all you UFO nuts out there: Put up or shut up. Let's see proof, and not the kind of BS fake proof the creationists trot out. Let's see some real, valid, empirical proof, not wild speculations. If you can't provide that, then shut your yap.
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Re:Precisely (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, we've done a lot of observing with respect to UFOs. We've done a little bit of hypothesising, but not very much. We've done almost no testing. 'They can't explain it so I must be right,' as you point out, is not the right attitude for science. The correct approach is 'they can't explain it therefore it merits further study.'
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No, you're the one who's missing the point, it's not about proving alien life, it's about getting ANYONE to get off their ass and investigate that whole shit, because it's obviously worth investigating,
What do you want to investigate? We don't have a crashes spacecraft to poke around in and neither do we have any idea when or why an UFO might pop up. So you literally have to sit around and wait for something to happen, as people are watching the sky already anyway, be it birdwatchers, astronomers, air traffic controllers, military or just random guy with mobile phone. If you want to investigate something you need something to investigate, random events at random times that happen only every few years in t
Re:UFO stories from airline pilots (Score:5, Insightful)
Even knowing which of these is the case would be interesting. Beyond that, knowing exactly what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, is worth knowing.
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1967 (Score:5, Interesting)
The UFO sightings in the 1960s were most likely stealth aircraft (such as the Lockheed A-12 [wikipedia.org], the deployment of which matches the dates in the article very conveniently)
No word on why an A-12 would be in Britain, although odds are that any Cold War era UFO sightings were experimental aircraft that the government didn't want anybody (read: the Soviets) to know about.
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A complete fraud... (Score:2)
You can find the documents here (Score:4, Informative)
The third batch are at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/ [nationalarchives.gov.uk] and then there's a link on the right two the first two batches.
It's fairly interesting that as with the US documents there's no smoking guns here but there are a lot of 'yeah that was experimental or military but we couldn't admit it at the time' and the rest is 'we have no idea what that was.' So either they're playing a meta-game here or there really is nothing but 'man that unidentified thing sure was... unidentified.' I think it's unlikely that two such incompetent entities could do such a brilliant job of covering up something as huge as decades (or millenia) long alien visitations, but this won't prove it either way.
In a completely unrelated note: (Score:4, Interesting)
More nfo here (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, they decided to release the files due to the sheer workload of responding to individual requests for information. The article states that they got more requests for info about UFOs than about Iraq for Afghanistan...anyway, you can get to the files here:
"All these files and more besides are now available on the MoD website, www.mod.uk. Go to the Freedom of Information section and search the Publication Scheme and the Disclosure Log, using keywords such as UFO and UAP and itâ(TM)s all there, alongside documents and files on a vast range of other fascinating subjects including MoDâ(TM)s 2001 remote viewing study."
Nick Pope Books: Operation Thunderchild (Score:4, Informative)
Nick Pope has written two science fiction books about alien contact, Operation Thunderchild and Operation Lightning Strike.
I've read Operation Thunderchild and enjoyed it a lot. It is set in Britain, which is nice for us because so much of the other material is set in the US and copies from itself so much that one film is like another. It also deals quite well with the whole difficulty that governments have in working out what's happening from lots of confused reports, deciding how to tackle the problem, understanding the intent of the ufos and when and what to tell the population.
I like it because the humans have a hard time and I think that's likely.